In tomorrow's SocietyGuardian section

• A charity in Sheffield is empowering female offenders to enable them to cope with life after prison. Erwin James reports• New research finds minimum alcohol prices in Canada save lives without harming the drinks industry• Survival for youth services has meant cutting jobs, reducing opening hours, charging fees, not buying new equipment, fewer trips or merging with other organisations, writes Patrick Butler• Your mental health benefits as much as your body when you put on your running shoes, says Clare Allan• Research suggests public sector workers need more integrated training, transferable skills and better communication• Princeton professor Danielle Allen tells Ed Miliband that the left's focus on the wealth gap is misplaced

On my radar ...

• The latest post on Patrick Butler's Cutsblog, which asks why hundreds of penniless benefit claimants are turning up at their local council asking for food parcels when they should have been offered a short-term loan by the local job centre. He asks whether this is due to cock up or conspiracy, and adds:

What's baffling is this shuffling around of claimants appears to merely delay the loan that they should have got in the first place. In Newcastle, the council is simply referring claimants back to the DWP and telling them to request a short term benefit advance. Latest figures show that since 1 April, Newcastle council has received 452 claims for emergency assistance, 390 of which were refused. Of these, no fewer than 326 were from claimants referred by the Job Centre, who were entitled to but not awarded a short term benefit advance.Various theories have been put forward as to why the DWP appears to be so obstructive: it wants to keep quiet about the loans because it believes they encourage welfare dependency; its staff do not know about the short term benefits advances (which were created at the 11th hour); it doesn't have the administrative resources to cope with the demand for short term loans.What seems clear is that having brought 150 local crisis assistance schemes into existence as part of its welfare reform programme, the DWP is unable to resist the gravitational urge to offload risk and cost onto those schemes, even though in this case it is not supposed to do so.That this wastes time, and causes hardship and humiliation for claimants who are entitled to state financial assistance but instead are offered in-kind help, or forced to go to payday loan companies to tide them over, seems entirely secondary.

• The "better off on benefits" myth. Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, writes for the New Statesman on government claims that welfare reforms mean it is "no longer will it be possible to be better off on benefits than in work". He says:

The "better off on benefits" fallacy has become common. In truth, there has always been a clue that it is an urban myth: no one who claims it exists has ever actually given up work to live the benefits high life. And why not? Probably because deep down they do not believe it, but it is also true that even when the benefit of working is highly marginal, most people want to work. As unemployment climbs above 2.5 million, and 6.8 million counting as underemployed, the reality is there are fewer than half a million job vacancies. The real issue for the government is not making work pay, but making work exist.PCS members working in jobcentres face a bullying management driving down their own living standards and setting targets that staff are told to deny exist. Low pay is so endemic that up to 40 per cent of the DWP's own staff will be eligible for Universal Credit themselves. It is grim, far worse than when I started working for the DHSS in the early 1980s. Back then we helped claimants and took as long as was necessary to get them the benefits to which they were entitled.On the other side of the counter (or more likely now on the other end of a phone) it is even worse, with claimants subject to more and harsher sanctions, unprecedented demonisation from ministers and a Pavlovian press trained to foam at the mouth at the mention of scroungers and skivers.

• A riposte to the justice secretary's proposals to overhaul prison "incentives and earned privileges" schemes from an inmate's wife. On the Prisoners' Families' Voices blog, she writes:

... my partner spends 23 hours a day in his cell because he is on a waiting list for a job in prison. Seriously, what do you expect the prisoners in these circumstances to do without a TV in their cell apart from create Holy Hell with the prison officers because that is exactly what will happen. Given I accept that prisoners are in prison for a reason, but where exactly are your so called 'rehabilitation' programmes, because you need to get off your backside and walk the talk and see how many prisoners are banged up for 23 hours a day.